Ok...so you're young and learning...your first few jobs in the working world. You'll need to learn as much and many different software platforms and tools as you can....from Excel, Access, Crystal reports, Photoshop, Web Authoring, Digital Photography, Programming, Audio editing, CRM mgmt tools, charting and financial software...tons.....if you dont...youll be left behind when it comes to a firm who DOES use this stuff...and DOES require that you're at least a bit literate in the software. Day to day...at almost any job...if you're comfortable using many different tools...you'll totally have more opportunities.... So you tell me....how are you going to drop the 50k-100k in all this software...just so you can practice and learn on it some. Remember...once you learn it...you eventually get your future employers to end up buying some of this software.
I purchased ADOBE Acrobat but I had trouble updating it a few years ago so I downloaded PDFCreator from http://sector7g.wurzel6.de/pdfcreator/index_en.htm. It is available as freeware under the General Public License. I don't think it does the sophisticated things that you can now do with ADOBE Acrobat but it works well for the creation of basic files.
Try AcroPDF http://www.acropdf.com/ Shareware, but free for personal and non-commercial use. Without license adds a "created with" line as last line of generated PDFs. Works great and is VERY fast!
in the distant past i've printed in postscript (using any popular HP postscript printer driver for windows, print to file) from programs like word and used xpdf (free to use, open source, and cross-platform i think) to create a pdf file.
I use OpenOffice...can read Microsoft Word and Excel documents and easily exports them to .PDF's http://www.openoffice.org